Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

- Edwards, Tryon

Best Quotes about Criticism

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

10.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

11.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

12.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

13.

Edwards, Tryon

14.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

15.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

16.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

17.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

18.

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

19.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

20.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

21.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

22.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

23.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

24.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

26.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

27.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

28.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

29.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

30.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

31.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

32.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

33.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

34.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

35.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

36.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

38.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

39.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Franklin P. Jones

40.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

42.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

43.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

44.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

45.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

46.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

48.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

49.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

50.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth